On Pace

They seem to have called this one about right, glad I paid attention yesterday. The 6 inches of snow I had was slumped to 4 inches, then 4 new inches last night, calling for 4 more today and 4 more tonight, maybe just 2 tomorrow. Everything is closed down, according to the radio, I certainly am. Nothing for it but to read, which makes having a huge personal library a godsend. I fully intend to shave and then to cook something this afternoon, another batch of grits, for sure, and probably the pre-ordained pot of chili. Not very adventurous cooking, but I'm not feeling very adventurous. Gets to 33 degrees for an hour, long enough for thick fog to fill the hollow, a little freezing rain, then back to snow. D calls and says the heart of the storm is supposed to come in tonight with much more snow. Oh boy. Sweep the porch and stamp a path to the woodshed, bring in an armload of frozen wood. I make one more meal off the pork loin before turning the remains (along with a pound of ground lamb) into chili. These new instant mashed potatoes are really quite good, the Homestyle Reds especially; I eat a serving for four before and with lunch. The cheap, generic brands are terrible, but do make a great binder, even holding together left-over grits fried as a johnny-cake. Extremely pissed off this morning: yesterday I picked up a bag of shredded mozzarella, to speed up the omelet and cheese grits parts of life (grits can take either the singular or plural according to John Thorne, so have it your way) and I didn't read the package. Noticed, when opening the package, that the sell-by date was July 5th. Read the label and discovered it wasn't really cheese at all, but a complete imitation. Stupid me, to trust what it called itself. Shredded Imitation Mozzarella Cheese, it says right there, in small print. If something is imitation it should have to say so in the main title. Desolate enough up here, right now, to not be stuck with fucking imitation cheese. It was on sale, what can I say? and I was a little strapped for cash, land taxes and truck insurance both falling at the same time. I keep saving this, because I expect to lose power. An ominous cast to the sky, late afternoon, gray on gray. We can still have the new show installed on time, but I really need to get in to the museum Thursday, to take delivery. Assuming, that is, that they can get here from Morehead, Kentucky, considering that the entire state is closed down today and tomorrow. The good news is that the new generation of liquid salts they're using on the roads now are quite effective at these temps. Worse than useless when it gets below 10 degrees, when they freeze and become there own special black ice. Four days of this, in the last six, is beginning to grate on me, I'll have to get outside tomorrow, work up a sweat, look for the fox. One Pileated Woodpecker today, with a haggard drooping crest. Even the outlaw crows stayed away, sticking to their roost. Thanks to several readers, I now know much more about crow roosting than I used to, and to ask Jennie, next time I see her (the local naturalist) where is the nearest roost from here. I'd very much like to go watch. Thousands of them all at once must be very loud. At five o'clock I get a whiskey and snow, and indulge a particular food craving that hits once or twice a year. Bought a small slab of un-sliced bologna, so I could have a couple of fried bologna sandwiches (multi-grain bread, mayo) with a big slice of raw onion. I'll have another tomorrow, with fried potatoes and onion, searching for the perfect food. I love fried potato sandwiches, with onion, and I love fried bologna sandwiches, with onion, and it seems to me that I might be on to something here. It could be hard to eat, to actually get the mouth around, but if I carefully sink a single layer of potatoes into the mayo on one side, then the meat, then the onion maybe embedded in a layer of horseradish sauce on the other side, I'd need something to keep the onion from sliding against the meat, maybe a thin layer of instant mashed potatoes. At Janitor College, I was a junior, and there was this guy, a senior, Vlad Gibson, whose driving desire was to be the janitor at the American complex in Antarctica. He lived for cold. He shaved, on winter camping trips in Alaska, with a mixture of snow and soap that he whipped together before dawn, in a tee-shirt. He always broke trail, when we were cross-country skiing, and one night, these were moonlight adventures, he got turned around by the overcast or sunspots or something, and we were hours late getting back to campus, near dead and frostbit. He opened the mess hall, heated water, for us to soak our feet, then set about making fried bologna sandwiches, with a large slice of raw onion; god they were good, such as memory is reliable. He died, a couple of years later, in that famous dry valley, where the winds whip at 70 below and there is no moisture, trying to save a seal, with whom, he had, by then, an amorous connection. The world, it seems, is much more complex than we could imagine. My older daughter calls, and I realize I don't understand anything. I need to be altruistic in addition to surviving. I'm not sure I'm up to the challenge. One reason I live the way I do is that no one makes demands of my time, within reason, and I'm shocked when someone does. Stupid fucking logistics.